Elsevier

Science of The Total Environment

Volume 691, 15 November 2019, Pages 1320-1327
Science of The Total Environment

Approaches for identifying PM2.5 source types and source areas at a remote background site of South China in spring

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.07.178Get rights and content

Highlights

  • PM2.5 samples were collected at a regional background site of South China in spring.

  • NMF coupled with hybrid models identified source types and source areas of PM2.5.

  • Dust, biomass burning, secondary formation, and coal combustion were dominant source.

  • Biomass and coal combustion comparably contributed to high PM2.5 concentrations.

  • Southeast Asia and South China were the main source areas.

Abstract

The receptor model is an effectively and widely used tool for analyzing the source of PM2.5, and its development and improvement have always been focused and challenged. In this study, approaches of source analysis is applied and compared. The PM2.5 samples were collected in spring of 2015 at a remote background site of Weizhou, South China and were analyzed for water-soluble ions, trace metals, and sugars. The 28 measurement species were introduced into the positive matrix factorization (PMF) and a non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) model for inter-comparison of PM2.5 prediction. Results showed that the NMF model is a more robust tool to identify source types and source apportionment in the case of a small sample size (n = 31). In NMF, four source variants were obtained as dust (15.6%), biomass combustion (11.8%), secondary formation (17.6%), and coal combustion (54.9%), corresponding to four main source areas. These were Southeast Asia, South China Sea, Taiwan Strait, as well as Pearl River Delta, respectively. The areas were distinguished based on hybrid receptor models, potential source contribution function (PSCF) and concentration weighted trajectory (CWT), by introducing the daily loadings of each source factor from NMF method. These model results were highly consistent with categorized chemical characteristics of PM2.5, suggesting that NMF linking with hybrid receptor models provides valuable implications for exploring source types and source areas of PM2.5. Meanwhile, biomass combustion and coal combustion comparably contributed to the high PM2.5 concentrations indicating control strategy in South China in spring.

Introduction

Atmospheric PM2.5 has been of particular interest these days due to the negative impacts on health (Lelieveld et al., 2015; Heft-Neal et al., 2018) and climate change (Zou et al., 2017). In numerous studies of PM2.5, source analysis is one of the research priorities and has been conducted over the past three decades (e.g., Thurston and Spengler, 1985; Maykut et al., 2003; Lai et al., 2019), due to its vital implications on control strategies (Cai et al., 2018). In the developed methods, receptor model is a widely used tool for PM2.5 source apportionment and has been originally proposed by Blifford and Meeker (1967). It is an analytical method using particulate components observed in a receptor site to inversely determine source contributions. The receptor model includes many types, such as principal component analysis (PCA), enrichment factors (EF), chemical mass balance (CMB), Unmix, and positive matrix factorization (PMF) (Zoller et al., 1974; Winchester and Nifong, 1971; Zheng et al., 2014). Among, the CMB, Unmix, and PMF models are officially recommended by the US Environmental Protection Agency (USPEA) (www.epa.gov/ttn/scram/receptorindex.htm). However, CMB doesn't permit a quantitative source apportionment of particle mass and needs to be combined with other methods to achieve the quantification. In order to quantify the source contribution, Unmix has been developed by Henry and Kim (1990). However, it remains problems in algorithms (Paatero and Tapper, 1993) and can't separate sources which have a similar contribution to particle mass. Then, PMF model overcomes these problems using a least-square method to obtain the source profiles and their contributions (Hopke, 1985; Paatero, 1997).

PMF usually computes some factors that cannot correspond to explicit source classes (Watson et al., 2008) and its convergence result is not clear, leading to the difficulty in result selection (https://www.epa.gov/air-research/models-tools-and-databases-air-research). Thus, chemical species as source markers have been incorporated into the PMF model to determine and optimize the source profiles of PM2.5 such as organics and radiocarbon (e.g., Choi et al., 2015 and Zong et al., 2016). In addition, PMF requires a large number of input data sets, typically larger than 100 samples as recommended by Hopke, to obtain a reliable solution. For few samples, therefore, the PMF operation has recently been combined with other receptor models to compare their results and examine its accuracy of predictions in PM2.5 source apportionment, such as PMF-PCA and PMF-CMB, etc. (e.g., Gibson et al., 2015, sample n = 45; Al-Naiema et al., 2018, n = 44). Among these models, PMF is considered to be the most robust model for PM2.5 source apportionment even in the case of a small sample size. In addition, a non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) model with a similar algorithm to PMF has also been operated independently to obtain PM2.5 source profiles of 70 samples (Shang et al., 2018). However, an inter-comparison regarding to the coupled NMF model (e.g., NMF-PMF) has not previously been performed with a small size of samples.

Moreover, most source apportionment studies of PM2.5 focused on the polluted regions such as the port city of Thessaloniki, Greece (Saraga et al., 2019), the industrial coastal city of Houston, USA (Al-Naiema et al., 2018), the metropolitan city of Beijing, China (Yu et al., 2019) and Seoul, South Korea (Heo et al., 2009), the semi-urban area of Malaysia (Khan et al., 2016), the biomass burning prevailed Indo-Gangetic plain (Singh et al., 2017), the remote background site in Duolun (continent), China (Wang et al., 2008) and at Gosan (island), Korea (Han et al., 2006), and others particularly continental East, South, and Southeast Asia. To our knowledge, however, there are currently no source apportionment studies of PM2.5 conducted at a remote background site in the most southern region of China, where biomass burning, as a significant source of PM2.5, is prevalent especially during spring (e.g., Chen et al., 2017; Li et al., 2017).

Source apportionment of PM2.5 therefore was conducted at a remote background site of Weizhou Island, Beihai, South China, which locates at the downwind pathways of air masses transported from Southeast Asia, continental South China, and Taiwan Strait during spring (Zhou et al., 2018). This is the first field study on source analysis of PM2.5 accomplished on the island and therefore filter sampling continued for a short period (~1 month) as a preliminary measurement. Consequently, NMF and PMF model were selected because both have been successfully applied to estimate the PM2.5 source types and their contributions on the continents of a small sample size as mentioned above. The reason that two receptor models were combined in this study is that there was no prior information about sources in this area and their combination was expected to produce a reliable result by comparison. Meanwhile, the model results were introduced into trajectory models, including potential source contribution function (PSCF) and concentration-weighted trajectory (CWT) model, to determine the potential source areas and their contribution to the PM2.5 source (Liu et al., 2017). Also, PCA method and chemical characteristics of PM2.5 were incorporated to assist interpretation of the source analysis. The work is important for the efficient policy-making to reduce PM2.5 in the most southern China since source apportionment in regional scale cannot be replaced by that extensively conducted in the polluted regions.

Section snippets

Sampling and measurements

Sampling station (21°02′N, 109°06′E) was built at 15 m above the ground in the most southwest of Weizhou Island, Beihai, Guangxi province, South China. As a remote site, it is often influenced by various continental outflow plumes (e.g., Southeast Asia, continental South China, Taiwan) under dominant monsoons particularly in spring (Zhou et al., 2018). It covers an area of 25 km2 but with a population of only ~16,000 and less industrial factories. Therefore, the site is taken as an ideal

Measurement overview

During the entire experiment period, the total concentration of measured compositions in PM2.5 ranged from 7.65 to 27.97 μg m−3 (average of 16.32 μg m−3), which were nearly same as those in a previous study (8.06 to 27.0 μg m−3, average of 16.2 μg m−3) conducted on the east coast of peninsular Malaysia in winter as both local and transported heavy pollution plumes (from Southeast and East Asia) influenced (Farren et al., 2019). All measurements comprised 37%–64% (average of 51%) of the total PM

Cluster analysis

Cluster analysis was conducted, on the one hand, to identify the transport pathways of total air masses. Four clusters were computed (SI. 2) and the relevant sample size for each cluster was shown in Table 1. Cluster 1 (45.2%), sourced from Southeast Asia. The air masses of Cluster 2 passed over South China Sea accounting for 9.7% of the total. Cluster 3 and Cluster 4 originated from Taiwan Strait (25.8%) and Pearl River Delta region (19.4%), respectively.

On the other hand, cluster analysis was

Source types of PM2.5

Prior to the source apportionment of PM2.5, the performance of the NMF and PMF model was assessed based on the comparison of their predictions. The comparison between observation and prediction for both models focused on several source markers (secondary ions, K+, Ca2+, Mg2+, Mn, Fe, Pb, and levoglucosan), which were used to identify source factors in following source apportionment by NMF. The assessment parameters included signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) and regression (prediction and observation)

Conclusions

For the first time, the source types and source areas of PM2.5 were analyzed using a NMF method coupling with several hybrid receptor models (PMF, PSCF, CWT, and cluster analysis) at a remote background site of South China during a short period of spring, 2015. By comparing with the PMF model, NMF model was found to be more robust to predict chemical species and thereby was more reliable to obtain the source types and source contributions. In the experiment period, four main sources were

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Department Public Benefit Research Foundation (No. 201309016, No. 201109005), the National Research Program for Key Issues in Air Pollution Control (No. DQGG0304-05) and the Fundamental Research Funds for Central Public Welfare Scientific Research Institutes of China (No. 2016YSKY-025). Special thanks give to Professor Gangwoong Lee for providing the package of NMF model.

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